But here, I have an average computer. Basically, when I press the middle button in Windows and move the cursor a little from the starting position the page starts scrolling which is very convenient because I don't have to scroll the wheel madly.

I looked at the second solution to the question mentioned earlier; the button drop down menu is greyed out.

2 Answers
2

You can enable it during the current session using the xinput command. First of all, determine the ID of the device you want by running the xinput list command. The output should look something like the following:

Eeeh, good for an ugly workaround... But I am looking for a more elegant solution because doing that isn't very convenient.
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nickguletskiiJun 18 '11 at 16:32

1

Well, you said that the gpointing-device-settings solution from the other question didn't help. If this suggestion works for you but doesn't work in gpointing-device-settings, then the bug is in that app (it is basically just a front end for twiddling xinput properties). You could follow that up with a bug report.
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James HenstridgeJun 18 '11 at 16:36

Also, the first answer in that question (an xorg.conf fragment) should do the trick (you should only need to set the EmulateWheel and EmulateWheelButton options though).
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James HenstridgeJun 18 '11 at 16:39

@James Henstridge I have just tried this, unfortunately this didn't work. xinput set-int-prop $ID "Evdev Wheel Emulation" 8 1 Invalid format 1 So I assumed that I had to replace $ID with the ID of the pointing device, I did. Returned nothing. Repeated with the second one. Doesn't do anything.
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nickguletskiiJun 18 '11 at 17:02

1

You should be replacing $ID with the ID of the device you want to modify (for the set of devices on my system, 8 or 12 represent my mouse devices). If you got the error "Invalid format 1", then you must have missed an argument and it was treating the 1 as the 3rd argument to set-int-prop instead of the 4th.
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James HenstridgeJun 19 '11 at 2:39

I'm wondering if you are talking about 'Autoscrolling' in Firefox here? I don't know how to get the feature system-wide, but if you are looking to enable middle click scrolling in Firefox, go to Edit/Preferences/Advanced/General and click Use autoscrolling. (Note that if you middle-click while hovering on a link, you will open that link in a new tab).

If this is what you want, you should update the question to mention Firefox. If not, sorry I couldn't help.